How one campaign prioritized TikTok in 2022
Val Demings’ Digital Director shares learnings from this cycle and how vertical video can make a difference
Welcome to Campaigner, a newsletter Q&A series highlighting the tactics behind political campaigns and the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
The vertical-video social media app TikTok continues to slowly take over the internet, and in 2022, more political campaigns joined the platform than ever before. One of the first major candidates to do so was Rep. Val Demings, who ran against Marco Rubio for U.S. Senate in Florida. For this week’s Campaigner, we spoke with Demings’ Digital Director (and former Arena grad) Cayana Mackey about her team’s digital program, use of TikTok, and how social media changed politics in 2022.
Q&A with Cayana Mackey, Digital Director, Val Demings for Senate
Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: I believe the Demings campaign was one of the first major statewide campaigns to use TikTok this cycle. What made your team want to join the platform and engage voters there?
Cayana Mackey: When we decided to get on TikTok, we knew that the platform was growing and it was being utilized by the younger generation. One of the things that I was really wanting to do on the campaign was reaching out to younger voters in Florida and get them on board for Val Demings. I had previously worked with a lot of Florida youth and had seen that they were very hungry for someone who could speak to them in new and different ways. So when I was setting out to build my team, I knew that not only did I want to prioritize TikTok, I wanted to have a role that was specific to creating TikTok content.
We actually created a staff position on the campaign for a Vertical Video Creator - someone whose specific job was creating vertical videos for platforms like TikTok. It was kind of a hard role to fill because you want someone who has video editing skills, but you really need someone who is just obsessed with TikTok, knows the trends, knows how to take current events and capitalize on trending moments. We were able to do that with our Vertical Video Creator, Jennice Vernet. She was just always knowing how to take a news event and turn that into whatever the trend of the moment was. She was able to really take the campaign’s messaging and make it into something that people loved to watch.
Like I said, looking for someone to fill this role was really hard at first because we were finding a lot of video editors, but not necessarily people who had an interest in TikTok. What made the difference between our content and others is that we had someone whose sole job was to study TikTok, create TikToks, and then translate that content to other vertical video platforms.
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Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: That’s really fascinating. Back in April, I wrote an issue of FWIW about how vertical video was taking over the digital campaign space, and the idea that your team would hire someone specifically to do that is pretty awesome. It says a lot about your team’s leadership to support that kind of role. It also makes me think that young adults who have expertise in making fire TikToks now have new opportunities to break into campaigns that maybe they didn't have before.
Cayana Mackey: Definitely. I think the first time I ever heard of a role like this was actually from both the Biden administration and the Jon Ossoff campaign. I think many of us saw how TikTok really changed the campaign for Ossoff in 2020 and gave him a platform where he could be really creative with his content.
That’s what we wanted for Val Demings. We knew that “The Chief” had a personality that could really resonate with people on TikTok’s format.
Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: Was there one piece of TikTok content that your team thought was really notable?
Cayana Mackey: Some of our strongest contrast and opposition videos were actually on TikTok. I wouldn’t name a single piece of content, but I will say that our campaign was just really supportive of a TikTok strategy and that's not the case for a lot of digital programs.
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It takes a lot of buy-in, but fortunately, our campaign manager understood that TikTok was this emerging, important platform and we really were given leeway to prioritize our presence there. Some of our strongest contrast and opposition videos were actually on TikTok.
Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: Which other major social platforms were important to reaching voters this cycle?
Cayana Mackey: We pretty much utilized every social media platform all the way down to Snapchat. Twitter definitely helped to generate headlines as kind of a “press-forward” social media tool, but we also used it successfully for grassroots fundraising. We’d also use Twitter for these “social bombs” where people would help fundraise with us by sharing links at certain moments.
We still used Facebook for persuasion and fundraising ads, which was a good platform for that stuff. We also used Facebook Groups as a distributed organizing tool. We had one large group for English speakers and one for Spanish speakers, and they provided a kind of organic way for our supporters to share content, hear about rapid response moments, and get plugged into any volunteer opportunities we had.
But I will say hands down, TikTok had the most reach out of every platform combined. That was something none of us really expected, but the numbers don’t lie.
Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: Digital teams are responsible for an increasing number of deliverables these days - from advertising to organizing to fundraising and social media. What do you think was your team’s biggest success, or what was your favorite moment on the campaign?
Cayana Mackey: That’s a great question. I think one of my favorite moments was the candidate’s debate night. Our team was ready to utilize all the rapid response moments, and turn them into some really strong fundraising numbers afterward. We also just generated tons of engagement and had built a strong process for getting content out really quickly. It paid off. We definitely “won” debate night not only because “The Chief” was an amazing debater, but also because of our team’s work pushing out content and turning it into value for the campaign.
That was a moment when I was just really proud of my team, because, believe it or not, none of them had worked on a campaign before. Everyone was super talented in their own digital fields but had never worked on actual campaigns. So to be able to explain the importance of debate night, do a little bit of practice, be super prepared going into it, and then just seeing them just take off in collaboration with the research and comms teams was an amazing moment.
Kyle Tharp, Campaigner: Is there anything else that you wanted to highlight about your experience on the campaign?
Cayana Mackey: Just one more thing about my team - not only had they never worked in campaigns before, but they were also very young and just super talented. I think that made such a difference because they were looking at politics and content from an average voter's lens that we were trying to reach. Not only getting young people on campaigns is super needed, but also diverse groups of people too. Our digital team was extremely diverse with lots of different backgrounds, and that helped our content speak to the people that we were trying to reach across Florida.
no shade but i wonder what wouldve changed if they hired experienced campaigners